New hope in the schoolyard
ROTTED AND warped playground equipment was a minor inconvenience at Roxbury's Rafael Hernandez School in Roxbury when compared with the 50 to 60 pounds of jagged glass that greeted students and parents every Monday morning in the early 1990s. But the going is a lot smoother now.
The lessons learned from redeeming playgrounds at the Hernandez and a handful of other schools more than a decade ago have rocketed Boston to the top of a national movement to build outdoor classrooms for elementary and middle school students. Public officials from Oakland, San Antonio, Savannah, and other cities are scheduled to tour several Boston schools today with an eye toward transforming their own underperforming schoolyards.
Most of what works well in Boston is rooted in partnerships between the city administration and philanthropic foundations. One such partnership - the nonprofit Boston Schoolyard Initiative - has restored 71 schoolyards and built nine outdoor classrooms since 1995. Doing so can require parents and community organizers to wrestle spaces away from the gangs and vandals who muscled in during weekends and after school hours. Volunteer clean-ups and family programs, if done consistently, are often enough to broom out the gangs. It's not cheap. The Menino administration has provided $18 million in capital improvements while private funders raised $6 million for construction and teacher training.
The eventual goal should be to create outdoor classrooms like the one at the Trotter School in Dorchester, where planting beds, sample woodlands, and green technology provide hands-on science lessons, according to Schoolyard Initiative interim manager Kim Comart. Ideally many students will find a good time and a good field trip no farther away than their own schoolyard. 